Smooth Pebbles : Spills of War

Profile

Author and journalist David Dobbs writes on science, medicine, and culture for the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Scientific American Mind, and other publications; "Buried Answers," one of his features for the Times Magazine, will appear in Houghton Mifflin's esteemed 2006 Best American Science and Nature Writing. The author of three books (see below), he is currently working on a book about the experience and neurobiology of fear. You can find more of his work at his website.

BOOKS by David Dobbs

Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral.
Oliver Sacks calls it "brilliantly written, almost unbearably poignant... The coral reef story becomes a microcosm of the conflicts -- between idealism and empiricism, God and evolution -- which were to split science and culture in the nineteenth century, and which still split them today.”

The Great Gulf
An epistemological argument disguised as fish fight.

The Northern Forest (with Richard Ober)
An environmental debate misses the most essential relationships in the ecosystem at hand.

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Spills of War

Category: Culture of science • Environment/nature
Posted on: August 17, 2006 4:57 PM, by David Dobbs

It's good to see NASA hasn't completely abandoned its mandate to look after the home planet. As its Earth Observatory notes:

Among the casualties of the conflict between Lebanon and Israel in the summer of 2006 was the Mediterranean. Israeli raids in mid-July on the Jiyyeh Power Station released thousands of tons of oil along the Lebanese coast, perhaps rivaling the Exxon Valdex accident in 1989. By August 8, the spill covered approximately 120 kilometers (75 miles). The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) flying onboard NASA’s Terra satellite took this picture on August 15, 2006. The United Nations, the European Union, and the International Maritime Organization planned a meeting for August 17 to discuss cleanup operations, which had been delayed by the fighting between the neighboring countries.

The spill put some 15,000 tons of oil into the Mediterranean. These images show the spill as it moves north from the Jiyyeh Power Station to the coasts of Lebanaon and Syria. The upper photo was taken August 15, a month after the power station was damaged; the lower photo, colorized to enhance relevant contrast, shows the spill a week earlier:

The spill, rivaling the Exxon Valdez disaster in impact, stands to affect coastal wildlife as well as tourism and fishing in the short-term and may cause health problems for both fish and human coastal communities for some time to come. EU, UN, and maritime officials met today to plan and organize a cleanup, which had to wait till the fighting stopped. Computer models, says the BBC, suggest that about 20% of the oil has probably evaporated, but some 80% is now on the coastline. It's just part of the larger environmental impact the war has had on the coast.

Comments

Hi David,
I hate to make my first reply to your blog a niggle, but there is enough water in the Mediterranean already. In the passage just below the first image you needed to say "oil"....

I'll just keep on reading now and try not to cause any more trouble.
(signed) marc

Posted by: Marc Buhler | August 21, 2006 10:27 PM

Duly noted, Marc, and corrected. This proves that though one cannot mix oil and water, one can mix them up.

Posted by: David Dobbs | August 22, 2006 9:55 AM